The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is based on the fourteen volumes of The Cambridge History of English Literature. Each chapter (except the last) takes for its subject-matter the volume that bears its title, and reference to tlie parent work is therefore easy. Paragraphs and sentences in their original form have been incorporated into tlie narrative when such treatment seemed desirable and practicable. Naturally, much that appeared in the large-scale History finds no place in the present limited survey. The matter most generally left undiscussed is that relating to sources and foreign affiliations. In a first sketch this is not im-)ortant. The reader must begin to know famous books themselves jefore he begins to acquire information about their supposed ancestry. The assumption that, in any region of literature, we should begin at "die begiiming" is quite wrong, if only because we do not know where or what the beginning is. We should begin at the end—our end. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is our end of several old stories, and we must know Hamlet itself before we can examine theories about it. The frequent practice of lecturing pupils, still children in experience, on such vast abstractions as "the Epic", "the Drama", " t le Novel" is bad, botli as a method of education and as an approach to literature. Many ill-fotmded judgments in criticism can be traced to the effect of generalities upon minds unprepared by particulars. The whole process is literally preposterous and creates a body of readers predisposed to superstition—readers, for instance, who accept easy generalizations about "the Victorian period", without reflecting that the long stretch of time between Oliver Twist and ThreePlaysfor Puritans contains as many different periods as the similar stretch of time between Dekker's Wonderful Year and Dryden's Annus Mirabilis; or readers who accept quasi-scientific definitions and theories of what is, and what is not, literature, without reflecting that though Dickens could no more have written A Sportsman's Sketches than Turgenev could have written Pickwick, tlie plain human, historical fact is that we want both. There is always an appeal from criticism to history, which is the record, not of suppositions, but of achievements. The main purpose of this volume, therefore, is to exhibit "the progress of poesy" as sometliing tliat really happened and interested many generations. The book does not offer a collection of opinions that a reader can take over ready-made. It is a guide to reading, not a substitute for reading. It represents, in the main, the general consensus of opinion. No one is required to accept without question the general consensus of opinion—indeed, every book must be reinterpreted by ourselves for ourselves; but if